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Saturday, 25 February 2012

My family ended up trilingual instead
of bilingual, as we parents had taken it for granted, not because we
one day decided that it would be fun (or “beneficial”)
to add a third language to our home, but because this thing about
agreeing on family language policies has more to it than just adult
know-how.

When
the children came along, our home was built around our two languages,
Portuguese and Swedish. Each of them was a foreign language to the
speaker of the other, but both nevertheless carried within them home
flavours that our former common language, English, never did. We went
on building our home in the same way for a number of years,
rejoicing, not least, in the added goodie that hearing our new
languages spoken to our children turned out to be a very effective
(and inexpensive) way of learning them ourselves. But home, of
course, is only one part of a child’s world.

Our children attended preschool in
both Swedish and German, although it was English that became their
real language of schooling. It did so in the best possible way. Their
first experience of an English-medium school was in Hong Kong. As it
happened, the principal had in place what he called a “buddy
programme”, something that we parents had never heard of before, to
cater for children whose command of English was for some reason below
par. Each new child became the ward of a veteran monolingual
English-speaking child in the same class. It was the veteran child’s
responsibility to make sure that the new child integrated, from
knowing where the toilets were located and how to use them (Asian
toilets included), through making new friends, to sorting out
difficulties with class assignments. It was the new child’s
responsibility to show active goodwill in integrating. There were no
rewards for any of the children. They took their teamwork as
part and parcel of school activities, on the awareness that if
someone in some class is struggling, then the whole class is
struggling.

It worked very well. One of our
children had a hearing disorder which up to then had stymied
integration in other schools, including monolingual schools in the
children’s home languages, and this was the first time that not
hearing well didn’t mean not feeling well in school. What I learned
from this was that school well-being, and therefore learning, is best
taken care of through assigning responsibility to the children
themselves.

It worked so well, in fact, that
English, the “foreign” language that we parents had once banished
from our home, found its way back in through the backdoor,
the children’s door. We came to realise two things: first, that we
parents needed to use English to assist with homework, because
homework comes in tongues; and second, that English was turning from
our children’s school language into their sibling language –
which it still is, by the way, now that the children are no longer
children. And no, neither of these novelties lost their novelty in
any smooth way. The children found it funny, to put it mildly, to
hear us parents use their
language to them; and we parents found it even funnier, ditto, to
watch our own flesh and blood build a cubbyhole of their own around
Foreign-Speak. You can read all about the negotiation of our
respective toils and tribulations in Chapter 10, ‘Language input
and language management in a multilingual environment’, of my book
Three is a Crowd?

The
title of this post, in short, reflects what multilingualism is all about:
each of the languages of a multilingual serves a dedicated niche. It
also reflects the dynamics of language use. Whether we use one
language or more, our children cannot become replicas of ourselves,
including in the niche that we assign to each of our languages,
because cloning fits sheep better than human beings. Like everything
that matters to us, languages matter more or matter less to different
people, or matter in different ways along our lives. The next post
has more to say about this.

Wednesday, 15 February 2012

In my family, both parents come from monolingual households
and from (officially) monolingual countries, Sweden and Portugal.
Both of us knew about other languages and other cultures long before
we met, including from daily contact through schooling and more or
less extended stays in other countries. Foreign sound and video bites
were also routine on radio and TV. Adapting to a “foreigner”
through marriage might then have looked like a straightforward
addition to a seasoned roll of experiences.

Well, not really. Whatever experiences we’d had, of other countries
and speakers of other languages, didn’t count as home. Home-bound
Swedishness and Portugueseness turned out to be all-new to us –
including to the natives of each culture. Puzzlements expressed by
Why are you doing that, that way? ended up a distant second to
Why am I doing this, this way? We confronted, daily, the
simple truth that you can’t see yourself for what you are unless
you become “foreign” to yourself.

The
exotic feeling of otherness was first compounded by our use of
English with each other. A few months into our marriage we realised
that that wasn’t
working at all: English was neither “ours”
nor allowing us to be us. It was a language of work for both of us,
and so a stilted, rather unwelcome guest to our home
– more on which in a coming post.
Neither did our lingua franca come complete with some cultura franca,
to which either of us cold relate.

So we built our home around Swedish and Portuguese. This had an
interesting side effect, by the way: as soon as we began
understanding each other’s languages, we came to realise that we
had in fact married quite different people than we had imagined.
There is, as the saying goes, no place like home.

With
our languages came our licences to use them as we were used to, in
the ways that identified us and “our” people. Suddenly, there
were no foreigners any longer in our respective family gatherings,
because everyone could speak the same language. Granted, there were a
few glitches along the way. When mingling with Portuguese relatives
and friends, for example, Dad never ceased to be baffled at why he
continuously got asked questions which were as continuously answered
by the same or other relatives and friends, who all then reported to
him that he was a marvellous conversationalist. He never got the time
or the chance to even attempt to open his mouth. Mum, in turn, became
unsettled at the long silences which come up in cosy Swedish family
gatherings, suspecting that the lack of uninterrupted chattering at
the dinner table was due to her presence. And what to say of where to
place the male Swedish guest of honour to a dinner party in Portugal,
or vice versa, who sits to the right of the hostess in a Portuguese
home, but to her left in a Swedish one?

Small stuff, perhaps. But nevertheless the stuff of everyday habits
which suddenly turn into daily surprises. You tend to want to blame
someone, something, yourself, the others, your languages, their
languages, for what fails to match your habits, forgetting that
habits are just more or less tribal rituals which appear to be set in
stone only through continued practice – more on which in a later post too. There is cultural novelty (or cultural clash, if we
choose to honour the war metaphors which are favoured to discuss
these things) whenever our necessarily local habits meet with other
local habits.

So,
question: did we become multicultural? It might be tempting to say
that we did, also honouring the current fashionable aura surrounding
multi-words. But that
would be as meaningless
as claiming that we had once been monocultural. I’d rather say that we
adapted, as much as we did when we moved from kindergarten to high
school, or from single to married life, or from Europe to Asia. We
knew we were different (who isn’t, really?),
and we didn’t mind either being so or being seen as such.

So, question: what happened when our children came along? The choice
to use each of our languages with our little ones was not so much a
deliberate choice as what we felt would come to feel natural to us.
Baby talk, nursery rhymes, child-rearing practices, had first come to
each of us in a single language, and so we did as we had had done to
us. But we also played it by ear. We soon realised that it’s
probably wise to avoid setting yourself the kind of New Year
resolutions that you know you won’t keep and you know will give
you a guilty conscience for that, when you embark on new adventures
like becoming a parent. The next post explains what kind of surprises
were waiting for us there too.

Saturday, 4 February 2012

Being a good child can sometimes have
its drawbacks. My children were good children (still are), who
readily followed suit on our home-made OPOLicy,
whereby Portuguese and Swedish are mum’s and dad’s default
languages, respectively, to be used if there is no reason to use
another language.

During the children’s first few
years, these were the other ingredients to the language-use recipe
that I would like to discuss in this post:

I was a stay-at-home parent. Mum
and dad therefore chose to speak Swedish to each other when the
children were around, to compensate for the children’s greater
daily exposure to Portuguese;

The children had only very
sporadic contact with other speakers of their (then) two languages,
because we kept moving from and to countries where these languages
were not used;

The children are, in order of
appearance, two girls and one boy.

Because the children were good and
because there was nothing amiss with their linguistic development,
they naturally spoke Portuguese and Swedish like mum and dad,
respectively. That they would do so was predictable, of course, in
hindsight. But hindsight is hindsight because you miss the sight when
the sight is in plain sight: we parents didn’t predict anything of
the kind. Whatever linguistic habits we noticed in our children’s
speech were good habits, because the children were speaking our
languages and that was all that mattered.

Those users of our languages with whom
the children had on-and-off contact,
however, did notice a number of things. Namely, the children’s
replication, in their speech, of the parents’ respective male and
female identities, evident through the parents’ linguistic
behaviour. Dad spoke boy-Swedish and mum spoke girl-Portuguese, so we
had all three children using female Portuguese and male Swedish, each
version of the languages complete with vocabulary, grammatical
devices, expletives and prosody. A previous post mentions a
forerunner to these language uses by the children, also out of sight
at the time.

Here’s one example of what was going
on. Both Swedish and Portuguese are gendered languages, where noun
words fall into distinct categories which are characterised by
grammatical features both of the nouns themselves, and of the words
which pattern with them, e.g. adjectives. With Swedish adjectives, we use the same
gender for males and females, whereas
in Portuguese we use one of the two genders of the language for
males, and the other one for females. If a Swedish-speaking child
says Jag är snabbt for Jag är snabb (‘I’m fast’),
the child is making a grammatical mistake, by using the wrong gender
on the adjective. If a Portuguese-speaking boy says of himself that
he is rápida for rápido (‘fast’), by using the
female-bound gender for the male-bound one on the adjective, he’s
projecting a mismatched identity. The thought that he’s (also)
making a similar grammatical mistake comes second.

My children had other baffling
encounters with gender. We were once cosily watching our brand new animated
video of The Little Mermaid, dubbed in Portuguese, and all
went hunky-dory until Ursula the octopus made his/her/its appearance.
The Portuguese word for ‘octopus’, polvo, well known to the children, belongs to the masculine gender, so its association with a clearly female
character resulted in hasty pausing of the viewing delight, to
initiate a lively Q+A session about things like (un)sexed beings,
(un)gendered languages and, not least, the sex of octopuses and of
people named Ursula.

More Q than A, actually. It’s not easy to explain these things, or to attempt to
correct child uses of them, in child-digestible language. What do you
say? “You are a boy, so you should say that you are rápido,
not rápida” or “You are a girl, so stop using dad’s
tones of voice”? Talking about language
doesn’t make sense to children – and doesn’t make anyone learn
how to use a language. To me, my children’s uses became
plain evidence that you crack a language through real-life input
from real-life people. Our boy had no male-Portuguese models
available to him at the time, surrounded as he was by all-female
users of the language, and conversely for our girls’ Swedish. In
case you’re wondering about what I say in point 1 above, the answer
is yes: I also spoke Swedish like dad, at the time.

My children’s budding uses of their
languages also made clear, to me, the importance of taking into
account a child’s language-learning conditions, where school or
clinical assessment becomes relevant. We all tend to judge people by their uses of
language, taking those uses as a faithful reflection of what people are, or are developing into,
an issue that I will come back to some other day. Inadequate uses of
language, however, may well reflect inadequate input, instead of
developmental or learning deficiencies.

Speaking of which, if you think that
children hold the copyright to glitches, false starts and dead-ends
on the road to multilingualism, the next post may have some news for
you.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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